How the Mutants Got Made

(A Romance in D flat major Op. 4 №9)

A car moves slowly down the tree-lined street. In its windows, the reflections of houses play out like frames of a film, each a subtle mutation of the next; side splits and back splits built quickly and thoughtlessly in the early seventies across what was once a sprawling orchard of Bosc pears and Northern Spies.

Henry stands on the sidewalk and squints at his piano teacher’s house from across the street. He listens to the last minutes of Olivia’s lesson — hears her stumble, pause; the repetition of a trickier passage. She has been working on this piece for countless weeks. Henry knows it by heart and anticipates the bars that always trip her up the most. As she works through it, he can sense each moment of amendment — that exact point where brain and fingers agree on the muscular equation required to correctly translate a code of dots and lines into sound.

He and his piano teacher, Mrs. Crisell, have choreographed their own ritual over a misaligned seven years. He arrived in her living room for the very first time at age four. His father saw early promise in his musical leanings and swore to anyone who would listen that his son had perfect pitch. But standing in that room, doily-covered and smelling of peppermints and dusty books, Henry felt nothing musical.

There is a lemonade stand on the corner. Its two vendors — brothers, five and seven years of age — filling paper cups with a liquid the colour of uranium, both high on their own product and spending most of their time killing ants and chasing the neighbour’s dog away from the plate of fifteen-cent cookies. From somewhere up the block: the rolling thunder of a Big Wheel, backyard screams, and the splash of a jackknife cannonball.

In the centre of the Crisells’ front lawn there is a cherry tree, its gnarled and twisted branches stretching well beyond the bungalow’s roof, leaves thick and casting a deep jade shadow on the grass underneath. Its fruit has fermented in the late August sun. Henry can almost taste the air from where he stands, syrupy and thick, like his gramma’s liquor cabinet.

The levels of bacchanalia this presents has not been lost on the local bird population. They crowd its branches like a drunken parliament of fowls. And what rises from within the leaves is universal:

“We-are-un-der-the-ta-ble-blind-sot-ted-and-joy-ous-ly-shit-faced.”

Repeated, like an anthem — warbling into the summer afternoon.

Henry sighs, adjusts his backpack, and begins to walk towards the house. From inside, the stop and start of the sonata has trailed off to a mutually conceded defeat. It will need more work in the weeks ahead. Notes scribbled into a lesson book. There you are, then. Go on now.

The screen door creaks open and shut. Olivia is standing on the top step looking mostly relieved if not a little shaken by the experience of the past 45 minutes.

“Hi, Henry.”

“Hi, Olivia.”

She walks down the steps to stand beside him. The two of them turn and stare at the tree. A half dozen birds are now scattered across the lawn, their instinctive ability to balance on a branch long since forgotten. They sit there, stunned and smug, like feathered Falstaffs.

“Did you have fun at Becky’s birthday?”

“It was alright, I guess.”

“I saw you skating with her for the Couple’s Turn.”

“She grabbed my hand. I didn’t…”

“I would have skated with you, Henry. Why didn’t you ask me?”

How to answer that? He’d wanted to ask her. Rehearsed it in the washroom five times, practiced what to say, making up jokes and trying to stop his ears from sticking out so much.

An adult voice rips through the moment: “Henry!”

The two kids look up at the door. Mrs. Crisell stands there stooped in its frame. Her greying hair is tied back tightly in a bun. Her dress is the colour of a rain puddle.

“Henry, are you planning to come in anytime soon?”

He glances back at Olivia. “I gotta go.”

Henry sits down at the piano bench and adjusts his pants, always fearful that the crotch fold will be mistaken for an erection. Mrs. Crisell opens his dictation book to the next blank page and writes the date in the top right corner in her crooked script. His throat is tight. He tries to think of something he could tell her, about how on his way to her house he cut down through the creek and found his little brother and friends catching crayfish and pitting them against each other in a plastic cookie box, like Tupperware gladiators. He thinks about what Olivia said to him outside just then how he wished he’d had the chance to tell her —

Thump.

From the corner of his eye, he catches something small and dark make contact with the large bay window. It slides down the glass to land dumbfounded on the lawn.

“Those damned birds,” Mrs. Crisell says without looking up from the dictation book. “They’ve been flying into my window all day.”

Henry smiles. He looks over at his teacher in the hopes of sharing a moment of amusement but it is clear she finds nothing funny about this whatsoever.

“Let’s get on with it then. Scales. Begin with F# minor.”

Scales (“Keep your wrists down!) are followed by arpeggios (“Very clumsy!”) From there, he hacks his way through the mathematics of a Bach two-part Invention. He loves how it seems to play like a computer punch card in a world of dusty white wigs.

“Dammit Henry! You’re still missing the timing of the left hand in bar 18. Did you practice that at all this week?”

“I…”

“And stop racing through this piece. You play it like it’s a hundred-yard dash.”

“Ok.”

Thump.

Thump.

“Those damned birds.”

She scribbles down some notes, Henry sees the word PAY ATTENTION underlined and in uppercase.

“Very well. Let’s see how you’re coming along with the Romance.”

Fumbling, Henry arranges the pages across the piano’s rack. He adjusts the bench, moving in slightly, lifts his hands above the keys, and takes a breath —

It starts with an alternation of 3-note chords with the right hand, rising and falling like a wave. After two bars, the melody courses in with the left, sad and stunning. He always plays it as though it was catching up with the chords above, hesitant at first but then seduced by the allure of the pace, a meandering thought that works its way through to both hands meeting in a definitive conclusion.

Then lightly and an octave above, a waterfall of chords. And it all starts over again, the same contemplative hesitancy with the left-hand building to that cascade of chords, only this time it’s a shorter fall.

The right-hand takes over the narration, finds its voice in the first few notes before building into a passionate discord.

Ms. Crisell’s pencil raps the edge of the keyboard.

“Crescendo! And don’t ride the pedal so much!”

Henry feels a surge of heat rise up through his body. Both hands suddenly take off, as though he is climbing up the side of a building like an oversized gorilla, hand over fist. Scaling across the keys and heading full bore to the top of the keyboard —

— the precise combination of variables that collided in that moment, when Henry laid his entire 11-year-old frame into that eight-note, octave-spanning, battering ram of a piano chord, would be impossible to scientifically discern. But an unofficial report would identify the bird as being a cedar waxwing, or Bombycilla cedorum, a shiny amalgam of brown, gray, and lemon-yellow, accented with a subdued crest, rakish black mask, and brilliant-red wax droplets on the wing feather; known for its dazzling aerobatics and a fondness for late summer cherries.

That it had gained considerable speed after stumbling out of the cherry tree is without question; indeed, if the act of bouncing off of the reflective surface of the bay window was a game that these wasted critters had devised then this particular flyer had stepped out on that branch with a liquid-courage-fueled determination to make the biggest bang of the flock.

But even factoring in the drunken swagger, there was the additional chance zagged trajectory of flight that led to a head-on impact with the weakest pane in the window, an imperfect cut of glass that had for years sat utterly susceptible to this epic event on that overripe August day, when a drunk cedar waxwing shattered through its defective barrier at an impressive 22 knots, snapping its neck in the transition indoors and skidding very much dead across the muddled tapestry of the rug, to rest at the feet of Henry and Mrs. Crisell.

Henry’s playing trails off in a scattering of notes offering vague harmonies to the resonance of the glass falling against the walnut hardwood. He senses a shift in air pressure, a new breeze discovering the edges of his sheet music. He takes his hands off the keyboard and places them in his lap. His teacher’s breath, which had disappeared entirely in the moment, returns in a stutter over which she immediately fights to regain control.

“That…that will be all for today Henry.” She finds the capacity to say, if only in a whisper. “Go on home, then.”

Henry nods in agreement. He collects his things and puts them in his backpack. He turns back to look at his teacher, but she sits in the same position, her eyes transfixed on the bird.

He steps outside and begins his walk home. The lemonade stand has fallen into disarray, the dog at some point having knocked out one of the legs of the card table and spilled its contents onto the sidewalk. It has since made off with the rest of the cookies. Coins are scattered and sparkle in the sunlight. One of the boys is crying. And the radioactive lemonade runs into the storm drain.